Burchett, feeling rather scruffy amid the uniforms and medals, asked tersely if Farrell had actually been to Hiroshima. Aha, he had not. After a scientist-versus-layman argument that ended with Burchett challenging the Army general on why, if all he claimed were true, fish died within seconds of entering a stretch of Hiroshima’s river, the correspondent received the closing admonition of a press briefing enacted to disprove him: “I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.”
Conspiratorial as it sounds, afterward Burchett was spirited away to a U.S. Army hospital for medical tests, which showed that his white corpuscle count was down—“a typical symptom of radiation sickness,” he comments sourly in a memoir, though the doctors pretended otherwise. On his release he found that his camera containing a film shot in Hiroshima was gone from his belongings, as was the carbon of his story. As was his press accreditation: MacArthur ordered Burchett expelled from Japan for “having gone beyond the boundaries of military occupation.” This proved futile once the objection was raised that he was still under the umbrella of Admiral Nimitz, based on Guam. The Navy, eager to seize an opportunity to simultaneously annoy both the Army and MacArthur, delightedly reaccredited him.
The point was not that nearly a hundred thousand Japanese might have died on a Monday morning from a sole bomb; more had died during a single night’s incendiary raid over Tokyo in March (as Weller described in detail in an August 31 dispatch passed by censors, though never published by his newspaper). Indeed, napalm had been developed to aid those firebombings. Nor was the point that many of the atomic-burned would never recover. The priority for the military, the government, and the American people was to end the war as soon as possible against a merciless enemy who had, after all, started it. Few in the United States in 1945 had lost sight of the fact that the Pacific war was entirely Japan’s doing; that their schoolmates and brothers had died of gunfire trying to capture some coral atoll in the Gilberts (as Weller phrased it once), rather than at Key West of old age.
No, the point to be carefully disproved and silenced was what Burchett called the atomic plague and Weller called Disease X. The city wasteland of Hiroshima that Burchett portrayed, far more devastated than what Weller saw in Nagasaki, was not what provoked a damage-control U.S. military press conference thirty-six hours after the article appeared, with editors round the world screaming through the cable wires for every reporter in Yokohama to get down to the nuclear sites and see for themselves. What provoked the official denials was Burchett’s claim of a deadly radiation that confirmed the many Japanese rumors and reports—the invisible death that after a month had still not gone away. Suppose it lasted even longer? Suppose it hung around for the U.S. servicemen who were soon to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Suppose it drifted over the nearby POWs awaiting liberation? A lingering cloud of radioactivity floating in the wrong direction (like after the July 16, 1945, New Mexico test) was a lethal liability.
Weller’s timing was perfect: his first dispatch from Nagasaki probably reached Tokyo on the heels of that press conference, either late the night of September 7 or the next morning. Worst of all, Weller—whose reputation was as every politician’s nightmare, a bulldog who, once he got his nose in the doorway, was not backing down—was still in Nagasaki, unstoppably typing away. The U.S. military had an idea what he would find out if he stayed there. And he did: the next evening the Tokyo censors received four more stories from him, including descriptions of Allied POW camps that lay directly under the blast, with prisoners killed as a result. His dispatches, already enough to fill a week’s front pages in Chicago and in sixty-plus syndicate newspapers for starters, never stood a chance.
(When U.S. forces finally entered Hiroshima and confirmed Japanese reports that several American POWs were killed by the bomb, the news was covered up. Families were informed only that their loved ones had died in Japan. The facts were not revealed until 1977, when War Department files from the occupation were declassified. Even then the Pentagon denied it.)
There had already been one important Hiroshima article to vindicate the U.S. government and subtly contradict Burchett. It appeared the same day, September 5, in the New York Times. This was by Bill Lawrence, who wrote as W. H. Lawrence (and not to be confused, as so many historians have done, with William L. Laurence, long-standing science writer for the Times, known to colleagues as “Atomic Bill”).
Lawrence (1916–1972)—who inevitably was called “Non-Atomic Bill”—was a brash young reporter who would later be a buddy of Jack Kennedy and spend the last decade of his career with ABC News. He’d covered Moscow for two years and glimpsed the war in the Pacific before being invited along on this junket. Via Tex’s airborne transmission equipment, he managed to speed his article home. Its thrust was to confirm U.S. strength. Lawrence called Hiroshima “the world’s worst-damaged city . . . the final proof of what the mechanical and scientific genius of America has been able to accomplish in war.” Without apparently entering a hospital, he referred—less markedly than Burchett—to “the other physical ailments of the bombs” and quoted Japanese doctors, who “told us that persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86% of their white blood corpuscles, their hair began to drop out, they lost appetites, vomited blood and finally died.” (Lawrence later claimed he did go to the hospitals; if so, this was not in the article as published.) But a week afterward, rather curiously—and despite encountering Weller in Nagasaki, who had interviewed Japanese doctors in depth about Disease X—Lawrence wrote: “I am convinced that, horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects . . . .”
Among all the junketeers Homer Bigart of the Herald Tribune, a reporter’s reporter, was probably the most trenchant. On the same day as the Burchett and Lawrence articles, he called the bomb “a weapon far more terrible and deadly than poison gas.” He described the effects, related by Japanese doctors, of death by radiation, but without using the dreaded word.
As a result of the press junket, Life magazine would decide that while a few in Hiroshima had perished from exposure to radiation right when the bomb exploded, no Japanese “died from radioactivity afterward.” Time was more skeptical, pointing out that “In a week when the first U.S. newsmen entered Hiroshima . . . and made plain the appalling devastation . . . the State Department issued a formal report on atrocities committed by the Japanese. The timing was not missed by many readers.”
Up till now MacArthur had been largely kept out of the atomic loop, forbidden to make any statements questioning the necessity of the bomb. His plans involved a leisurely three-month timetable for occupying southern Japan. He was furious at this press caravan flown over from Washington and outside his control. He considered court-martialing all of the reporters and officers involved for traveling outside the occupation zone and risking an incident with the Japanese; instead he cut off gas supplies to any planes that might repeat the transgression. The junket was forced to drag a lieutenant general over from Guam to requisition fuel to keep their B-17s flying.
The press junket ran counter to MacArthur’s interests to the degree that anyone who disobeyed him was profoundly annoying. Their reporting would inevitably enshrine the effectiveness of the atomic bomb at the expense of his own importance. Plus it got all the other journalists yelping about when they might see Hiroshima and Nagasaki for themselves, which only solidified his determination to keep a lid on the two cities and a firmer grip on Japanese censorship. The junket did, however, run parallel to his interests to the degree that it would create, in a home readership, a sensation of earned and absolute power in American hands over Japanese lives—of which MacArthur was now the supreme instrument.
Some historians, from the moral high ground of the present, have laid all sorts of collectively Byzantine accusations upon this U.S. military press junket. As Burchett puts it, the reporters had been selected “to participate in a great cover-up conspiracy, although some of them may not have realized this at the time.” Welle
r saw them as hasty day-trippers, like “yacht passengers who have stopped to buy basketry on an island.” They seem to have made no serious effort to investigate claims of deaths by radiation, and by the time they were whisked into Nagasaki they certainly had no excuse of ignorance. Although Burchett beat them into Hiroshima by only a few hours, his article has an utterly different flavor than theirs, partly because he was able to see the whole situation through Nakamura’s experienced eyes, and partly because he was not there as a guest of the conquering government.
In any case, the U.S. Army went rapidly into a public relations spin cycle. They’d hoped to keep both nuclear sites virginal from the Allied press, but suddenly reporters, monitored or not, were thick on the ground in one of them. General Farrell, the day after his press conference excoriating Burchett, and hoping to counter alert Japanese diplomatic efforts abroad to present the bombs as a crime against humanity, took a research team of eleven scientists down to Hiroshima to see for himself (September 8). One member later stated he was openly told by Farrell that their mission was “to prove that there was no radioactivity from the bomb.”
Meanwhile George Weller was still in Nagasaki, sending up dispatches to the censors’ wastebaskets. On September 9, after having the story to himself for three days, he was upended by the junket’s arrival—though his reception by McCrary & Co. was warmer than what they gave Burchett. Maybe this was because they expected him to be there; and once they let him know how furious MacArthur was at his relentless articles, Tex (“kindness itself,” as Weller recalled) offered to send all his dispatches once airborne. Was this because Weller was American, not Australian? Or was it to control the stories? Yet Weller never discerned ulterior motives in Tex’s offer. It seems more likely that the junket and its officers, having been denied fuel for their planes and even threatened with court-martial, were fed up with MacArthur’s posturing, and saw Weller not as a competitor but as an ally. What did it matter, since they’d already published their Hiroshima stories? They could not guess at all he had seen that they had not, and he would speak of them only as cohorts who’d evaded MacArthur’s blackout more adeptly than he.
Their encounter begs the question of whether Weller admitted to himself that MacArthur’s reputed anger meant his stories were not getting through. If MacArthur’s censorship had something of the personal vendetta about it, then Weller’s refusal to seize the opportunity he was offered also carries a bit of the stubbornness of a feud. Clearly the press junket stopped him in his tracks; no dispatch by Weller written the evening of September 9 survives. The next day he temporarily gave up on Nagasaki. As he later wrote, “Then [i.e., once the junket left] I heard of an unopened prison camp at Omuta, full of human derelicts. I went there and found a strange group of awed prisoners who had seen two mushroom clouds on the horizon . . . .”
On September 12 Farrell held another briefing in Tokyo, to convey the results of his science expedition to Hiroshima. Bill Lawrence’s coverage for the New York Times was headlined “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” Farrell denied that the atomic bomb “produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” He also countered a frequent Japanese accusation, stating that “no poison gases were released” at the moment of explosion—which was literally true. Lawrence, from what he’d seen with his own eyes and even written a week earlier, would have known that the press conference was deliberately misleading, but there was no skepticism in his article. (As he bragged in a 1972 memoir, “even politicians know that I can keep a secret.”)
Stateside, there was significant activity from the greatest atomic authority in the press. Whatever MacArthur’s spokesman might have said when laying down the laws restricting correspondents’ movements in Japan, it was now military policy for reporters to spearhead the propaganda—an equally significant occupation.
The lever of this propaganda was the science writer for the New York Times, William L. Laurence. Laurence had been born in Lithuania in 1888 of a highly religious Jewish family, some of whom were later killed by the Nazis. He made it to the United States as a poor young man, fought for his adopted country in World War I on the battlefields of France, and succeeded at the American dream. By age fifty-seven he had two Harvard degrees and a Pulitzer Prize, having been with the Times since 1930. But for four months he was paid dual salaries. On loan from his newspaperman role, without the knowledge of his colleagues he became the privileged witness, official chronicler, press-release author, reporter-at-large, and unnamed spokesman for the War Department, for the Manhattan Project (which developed the atomic bomb), and for President Truman. When the bomb went off over Nagasaki on August 9, Laurence was in one of the B-29s, having cradled the device in his tremulous hands scant hours before. It was, he wrote for the New York Times but on behalf of the government, “a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
Historians have written much, especially recently, about this symbiotic relationship. What appears today a flagrant conflict of interest was little remarked on a couple of decades ago, and even praised by analysts of the press twenty years before that. Laurence had written about atomic energy since 1929 and, as the first and most eminent newspaper science reporter in the land, enjoyed an oracular status. General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, approached the newspaper’s publisher and its senior editor on behalf of the War Department and arranged to borrow Laurence in April 1945 as special consultant for a top secret project. The implication was that when events exploded, the New York Times would have a monopoly.
What deepens the stain on all parties involved is how far it went. The Times abandoned any stance of impartiality or code of ethics; W. L. Laurence gave vent to his own sense of divine mission, and seems never to have felt his journalistic duties were compromised; and the U.S. government proved a masterly puppeteer. As often with an embedded reporter, if the sense of privileged access is flattering enough, obedience will be total—the message will be delivered not only as instructed, but with an extra flourish.
Groves already had public relations people on the Manhattan Project, but a respected journalist was needed to supply an imprimatur and a gravitas. Laurence was proud of his new role, since he believed that atomic power would prove the greatest scientific achievement of the twentieth century, which he quotably dubbed “The Atomic Age.” For 119 privileged days he flew all over the country to laboratories and test sites and plants, interviewed the Allies’ top physicists, had his wastebasket contents burned daily, told his wife practically nothing, and turned out scads of press releases or official reports—which were stamped TOP SECRET and locked in a vault until needed.
From behind the Atomic Curtain, as he termed it, he witnessed the July 16 Trinity test in New Mexico, the very first, and thought it a “Genesis . . . as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: ‘Let there be light.’” Laurence even saw a gigantic Statue of Liberty take shape in the mountain of clouds. He drafted the War Department’s worldwide press release that accompanied Truman’s August 6 radio speech on Hiroshima, calling it “unique in the history of journalism . . . No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.” He’d written an early draft of the president’s own statement, but it was rejected by the White House as “exaggerated, even phony.” His role was proudly displayed by his newspaper on August 7, touting him as the voice behind “pounds of official reports and bales of War Department handouts designed to enlighten laymen on the working of the atomic bomb.” It did not disclose his dual-salary status.
Laurence’s role in the carom of the story was only beginning. In mid-August, rather than being allowed to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki as was planned, he was yanked back from the Pacific to the United States. He was still on both payrolls. On September 9, the New York Times ran his exclusive eyewitness account of dropping Fat Man on Nagasaki (“a thing of beauty to behold”). This was a month after the bombing, the same day that three more of Weller’s Nagasaki dispatc
hes, including extensive interviews with Japanese doctors and visits to hospital wards jammed with the dying, were stopped by the censors.
All the other reporters had stayed in Hiroshima for a few hours, written one story, then moved on. Only Weller was turning out an entire series from a nuclear site, with each article pivoting on the last, enlarging it, deepening it, revising his earlier assumptions and impressions.
On September 12, the Times featured Laurence’s front-page story from Ground Zero in New Mexico where, along with thirty fellow reporters and photographers, the job was to prove that at the very “cradle of a new era in civilization,” two months after the Trinity test, there was no dangerous radioactivity. He quoted General Groves: “You could live there forever.”
At this point all speculation becomes moot about any enthusiasm the Chicago Daily News, had they received Weller’s dispatches, might’ve shown for challenging a competitor. On September 14 the War Department sent “in confidence” to all editors of newspaper, magazine, and broadcast media a note from President Truman asking that any information about the “operational use” of the atomic bomb be kept secret unless quite specifically approved by the War Department. The purpose was “the highest national security.” In other words, no substantive coverage without approval. This was not, it was stressed, censorship. Of course it had the same effect.
By this time Weller was busy piling up dispatches among the prison camps of Kyushu—the eyewitness accounts of seeing both bombs explode.
On September 18 MacArthur enacted a new censorship regime for all media in Japan banning, among the code’s ten clauses, “Anything . . . that would promote hatred or disbelief in the Allied forces.” This meant the bomb. All newspaper or magazine articles and photographs had to be passed by a censorship board before publication. However, it was forbidden to mention that there was any censorship. These strictures were soon extended to books, radio broadcasts, movies, and mail. The censorship did not end in Japan until October 1949;* scientific papers were not liberated until 1951.
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